


trudgin' down the lonesome road

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Character Study, Dysfunctional Family, Kronos is his own warning, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:10:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Centaurs are never gods, even human scholars know this. Chiron straightens the blanket covering his chair's wheels, the hooves beneath. There are so many things the records don't tell."</p><p> </p><p>Chiron through the ages: the centaur, the bastard, the teacher and everything in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	trudgin' down the lonesome road

 

In all the stories that speak of scorned brothers, forgotten and embittered, all those figures of myth and folklore wear dark clothes and stained crowns, cloaks that flap is the chill wind. They nurse their plots and hurts close, feed and water them regularly. When they walk no one turns to listen, their steps too light to be heard among the praise of their better, greater siblings, until the day when people's ears strain I fear for their steps, the horrors they bring.

This is not one of those stories. 

 

 

Chiron's paternity was no secret. Often he read about it in the textbooks he used to teach classes of fresh faced students, some of them of godly blood and all of them children. They write about Kronus and the nymph Philyra as a side note, a curiosity. Centaurs are never gods, even human scholars know this. They teach it to their children, on stuffy classrooms with too-small windows, walls painted beige or yellow. And when the reason shows itself, Chiron teaches it too. Chiron straightens the blanket covering his chair's wheels, the hooves beneath. There are so many things the records don't tell.

His brethren were born of could and sunshine, dew and warmth. Chiron was born of a girl-nymph taken by a horse. History forgets that, if it ever cared to remember. They forget that the reason Apollo and Artemis were counted as his guardians was because no one else would look at him, would sully themselves with his presence.

(they cursed him and named him monster, named his nature _abhorrent_ and _not like us_ and _useless_. chiron hated to be of no use before he knew what it meant, what giving and giving and giving entailed.

he stopped hating it, after a time. time was the one thing he was rich in, he had thought once. there was no other way he wished toshkent it than helping others).

His mother had left him to the forests, not daring to pray for his sake. Prayers had done nothing for Philyra, for what mercy had the king of kings shown her? They would say she left him among the bushes and seaside pinewoods out of disgust for his form. That is a conjecture, and incomplete. Chiron's mother left him behind out of disgust for many things, least of which his tiny hooves and curled tail.

Wild things grow, crooked and rugged and hard. Chiron had not been hard, as a child. He had been lonely then, a colt, gangly-legged and soft hearted. Cheerful, as much as he could. He had liked to braid his hair like the nobles braided their horse's manes, embellished with honeysucker and heather and marigolds, liked the way it smelled and how it made the reflection in the shallw forest ponds look, green tinted and crowned.

Every time he walked into town to hear their songs and partake in their tales they threw stones at him, bruised his oak-brown flanks. He would nurse his hurts with braided reeds, soaked flowers, advice spied from a healer's window. What food he had he hunted or gathered, imitating the fires human's cooked their meat in. When he sang none of the nymphs answered. He sang anyway.

When Peleus brought him Achilles to teach, the boy asked where his mother Thetis was. Thetis was of the sea and so wild and tether less , but that was too harsh a lesson for such a young child.

Chiron raised him in the forest, instead. Taught him how to hunt wild swine and mountain lions, how to suck the marrow out of the bones of she-wolves, and sang him tales for Achiles to sing to Thetis his mother when she returned from the waves. Thought him how to fight and how to heal, thought the boy was far to eager to do the first and had too little patience for the second.

Achilles died, of course. Of course he did. They all would, but Achiles was the first, the first-loved, the first-lost. Chiron would be a grieving father a hundred times more, a thousand times over, but Achilles was the first and so when Achiles died Troy shock and Chiron told himself he would do better the next time.

(there would always be a next time. that was kronus lone gift to his ill-begotten spawn: time. so much of and so little of him to fill it, to make it count).

He tries again. Hercules became a child-killing brute. Again. Jason forgot how to step on the earth, lost himself in the sea and the sky. Again. Asclepius did not know how to want anything less than the impossible, learned too well from him to value nerve over probabilities. Again. Again, again, again-

(and then, suddenly, unsurprisingly, one of his students strikes him down. there is poison, pain, betrayal most foul. the oracle singing _physician heal thyself physician heal thyself_ and chiron tries, he tries. he does not want to die. there is so much he has not yet learned, so much to live for, and he _wants_ , though he knows there is blood in his hands and so many dead children weighting him down. the peace he does find sits sour in his tongue but all peace is sour, every negotiator will tell you that a middle ground never pleases anyone.

chiron had been living in the middle ground for so, so long).

 

and _again_. 

 

(he lives. by the gods’ grace he lives, the centaur teacher breathes as long as he has anything to teach. as long as he is needed and he knows a hole in an edit in a way zeus law-maker never could but he is done being angry at a world that only values his usefulness. let them let him be useful. His children need him).

In the stories that speak of scorned bodies they bruise figures much like Hades, dark brooding monsters, cracked skeletons of a thousand frozen-over hurts, hairline fractures all the way to the marrow. Chiron once thaught an abandoned child how to survive out of the bones of dead she-wolves. Chiron hunted the mothers for their pelt and meat and bones, but he never ate their young, no matter how hungry he was. Sometimes he nursed them back to health all winter long, only let them go when the first buds of spring bullied their way through the snow. 

In the summers of his childhood he ran through the oak woods and viper trees and strawberry bushes with packs of yipping wolves at his hooves. 

 

 

Chiron taught, and raised, and prayed for gods who did not listen, who knew not how to be merciful. He prayed regardless. That too was a lesson.

(chiron was patient. chiron was a teacher, a healer, a hunter. he knew how to bide his time. he knew scars, the way kronus took the world, every moment of it, and twisted it to his image. the gods were selfish and cruel and crude, and yet chiron loved their children. and they made their children at their image as well: how could he not hope for the gods?

how could he not pray to them for their own sake, when they were so alone, so small still, children cowering in their father's stomach? he was only as valuable as he was useful and yet. families were such useless, precious things).

  
Centuries pass and every year is a fight, every year there are cold forms wrapped in shrouds and fire catching on wood catching on cloth catching on flesh. Empires rise, fall, rise again. He counts them by the number of children he heals, the ones that get up again and the ones that don't. He has cried with smoke-pained eyes so many times.

Chiron remembers every name, every child. As long as they need him he lives and as long as he remembers they live on, too. That is his legacy: ash, advice, campfire songs and fire-burned shrouds. This is all he has to give. To every child he says: take it. let me be of use to you. let me help you.

He thinks, let the gods spend their seeds. Let them be promiscuous and break human hearts like clay, for human hearts are strong and beating things. His back aches and his flanks are scarred and he thinks firmly: let them have their thrones and glory and petty feuds for I will have their children and in their hearts of hearts they will call me father.

(and for as long as they need me they will have me).

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> In the myths Herakles/ Hercules shot Chiron his teacher with a poisoned arrow. Chiron could not heal himself despite his gifts on the art.
> 
> The title comes from a Frank Sinatra song, because Chiron is canonically a Frank Sinatra fan.


End file.
